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The filesharing case of Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset has a long, convoluted history. In October 2007, a jury found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable for copyright infringement for file sharing, and awarded a $222,000 penalty for sharing 24 songs on a peer-to-peer network. That was an award of $9,250 per song. At the time, Thomas' case was the first file sharing lawsuit to reach a jury verdict. In May 2008, Judge Michael Davis requested briefing on whether Thomas should receive a new trial. The court said it was concerned that it might have made a mistake by instructing the jury that Thomas could be found liable if she simply made copyrighted songs available in a shared folder. There's good reason for this concern — as EFF noted at the time and several courts have since affirmed, "making available" is not a cause of action under copyright law. EFF weighed in as amicus in June of 2008. In September 2008, the trial court concluded that simply "making available" is not a distribution and on that basis granted Thomas a new trial. The judge also called upon Congress to amend the Copyright Act to avoid the award of damages in P2P cases that are "unprecedented and oppressive."

Things got worse: a second jury awarded statutory damages of $1,920,000, and when the trial court then held yet another trial, a third jury awarded $1,500,000. Judge Davis found that awarding $1.5 million for distributing 24 songs -- an amount of $62,500 for each song -- was "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable." He therefore reduced the judgment to $54,000, a "mere" $2,250 per song.

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The ruling evoked groans of dismay from some quarters. In a blog post, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a brief on behalf of Thomas-Rasset in the case, criticized the verdict.
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In a joint amicus brief filed Friday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, the American Library Association and others urged the St. Louis-based federal appeals court to accept a reduced damage award against Jammie Thomas-Rasset.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)--joined by the Internet Archive, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the American Library Association, and Public Knowledge--is arguing differently, and Friday it filed a "friend of the court" brief with a federal appeals court in Minnesota asking...

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of libraries and public interest groups have asked an appeals court to affirm the downsized copyright damage award in Capitol v. Thomas-Rasset – the first individual file-sharing case to go to trial.
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In the latest development in the first individual file-sharing case to go to trial (three times now!), Judge Michael Davis today reduced a $1.5 million damage award against the defendant Jammie Thomas-Rassett to just $54,000. Though he said he was reluctant to interfere with the jury's decision, the judge...

In any event, we left the office Thursday of last week feeling uneasy; we just didn’t understand how or why someone could get hit so hard for illegally downloading two dozen songs. With that in mind, we went back and checked in with Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney...